Can You Eat an Intuitive Keto Diet?

When you first start following a keto diet, overthinking is pretty much part of the package. For better or worse, keto newbies spend a lot of time learning what they can and canҴ eat, meticulously weighing and measuring food, and tracking everything that goes in their mouths. Weighing, tracking, and restricting become understandably tedious after a while. I do know some people who are happy to maintain this level of dietary vigilance for months or even years, but most people fizzle out. Those who donҴ want to return to a more relaxed way of eating like Primal look for a compromise positionס keto diet without all the fuss. This raises the question: is monitoring and careful control of your food intake simply part and parcel of keto, or is it possible to follow a keto diet intuitively? What Does Intuitive Keto Even Mean? Thereҳ an apparent contradiction between eating intuitively and keto dieting. Eating intuitively means listening to your body, honoring the signals it sends you, and not controlling or restricting your food intake based on external rules. Keto diets come with an inherent set of rules and restrictions. At the very least, keto diets have to be low-carb by definition. In practice, this means there are many high-carb foods that you canҴ eat in any appreciable amount. Even a small serving could interfere with ketosis. Many folks also set parameters around their keto diets, like they have to be gluten-free or sugar-free. As I have explained previously, thatҳ not technically true, but those are common values in the keto community. If your inner voice urges you to eat a couple candy bars, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread, or even a large bowl of mango, you canҴ comply and still be ketogenic. You canҴ listen to your intuition. Thus, if such a thing as an intuitive keto exists, it has to involve some sort of compromise. That said, I believe when people say өntuitive keto diet,Ԡthey mean keto without all the fuss and micromanaging. That is possible. Lots of people do it by: Eating mostly animal products, vegetables, nuts and seeds, and fats (all low-carb foods) Eating when they are hungry, not rigidly adhering to a set eating window Allowing hunger to guide how much and how often they eat in any given day Not tracking macros Thatҳ how I would define an intuitive keto diet, anyway, and the definition I'll use for the rest of this post. One could argue, though, that thatҳ neither keto nor intuitive, not really. Eating Intuitively Versus Intuitive Eating Itҳ impossible to talk about intuitive keto without clarifying the difference between eating intuitively and Intuitive Eating (with a capital I-E for clarity). The former is loosely defined as eating according to your bodyҳ hunger cues and desires for different foods. The latter is a specific eating philosophy developed in the mid-1990s by two registered dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, that is still popular today. Any kind of purposeful ŠContinue reading Can You Eat an Intuitive Keto Diet?The post Can You Eat an Intuitive Keto Diet? appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple